Ask HN: When did computers stop being fun?

>Basically, the spark I felt some 25 years ago seems to be completely gone.

You got old. The thing you loved became work. That's when most things stop being fun. Don't know what to tell you. Maybe collect stamps or something.

Raspberry Pi + Home Assistant is really fun, especially if you try to create your own self-hosted voice assistant and connected speaker system

It was fun when the Commodore Amiga came out and outshone the Macintosh, until the Mac II came out, of course. But the Commodore Amiga and Atari ST had emulators for all kinds of computers.

Of course, when Commodore went bankrupt, the fun ended. They didn't innovate or market like the Apple Macintosh or IBM PC Clones.

You can still program in BASIC with PC-BASIC: https://robhagemans.github.io/pcbasic/ BASIC was always fun to use.

When you got old :)

I know what you mean, I think that happened when Corporations took over the internet.

Plus, when Smart Phones came out, most were locked down. If they were not locked down I think it would have been lots of fun for the young hacking them. Now, almost all devices are in the process of following the Cell Phone Trend.

But some fun can be had with the *BSDs and some Linux Distros, hopefully that can continue in spite of these new Age Verification Laws.

Seems the young of today cannot hack, break, fix computers now, they seem to be on a Assembly Line to Corporate boredom.

loving is laborious

Help the younger generations find the same fun you did. That's where satisfaction is often found as we age.

They’re still fun? Why not? It’s more magical than ever now, even if it’s changed a lot from the “glory days” which is nostalgic thinking mostly.

They’re still fun, but you have to be really good at understanding what your idea of fun is, listening to that voice, and not falling prey to what other people/companies with an agenda are trying to push on you as fun (when it’s just crap designed to fill their pockets).

99% of everything is crap, but if you want to find that 1% that makes you so happy you found it, you have to deal with trudging through that 99%.

Also it helps to try and socialize with people who have similar values and notions of fun as you so they can point you to the things they find fun. You won’t agree a lot of the time, but it’s still interesting directions to have on your radar.

Get back into computers that have limited ability but are fun to use, such as the MNT Reform.

Over the last 30 years the culture and power has made a gradual shift from 100% pure hobbyists to 4% hobbyists, 48% scammers/predators, and 48% commercial.

You can't pinpoint when the fun stopped and it's subjective. I personally became conscious that the party was fully over around 2023, after a few years of feeling it subconsciously.

2023 was when Twitter and Reddit changed their respective APIs and became openly user hostile, which was the symbolic turning point for me.

I feel this a lot too these days. The only place the fun seems to remain for me is in Linux and in devices out of China, that you can hack and experiment with — like the Anbernic consoles, or the Xteink X4, or the little mp3 player DAP things, or the Sipeed NanoKVM devices, or the Supernote. The Steam Deck probably sits in this niche too, now I think about it.

Alongside the purpose they serve, all of them can be trivially broken into and re-tooled however you like — and for me at least, that’s where a lot of fun lies in computers. When it comes to mainline desktops now, everything is incredibly expensive and deflating.

It coincides significantly with YC, Zuckerberg, and Amazon. Internet is becoming soulles by the day.

[dead]

Get a uConsole!

Or any of the trending variants.

Little computers are still fun.

For me it's the advent of LLMs. AI is boring.

Microcontrollers are fun. The specs of modern MCs are similar to home computers 30 years ago. The community aspect is there. They’re cheap, too.

Personal computers are still fun for me, although it has waxed and waned over the years since I got my first 8 bit computer in the 1980s.

Linux kep it fun. Even during a time when I worked with windows professionally I always had a Linux distribution installed somewhere.

As a short history of fun in no particular order:

First time I got XFree86 working after having to endlessly configure display settings.

Using Yggdrasil to do remote support for Sun systems.

Hacking on a cd-rom driver to get mine to work.

Building a media server on an NSLU2. My media server is still called “the slug” despite being on an RPi now. At one point my kids had repurposed PS2s in their rooms with all their favourite shows at their fingertips. Sounds lame now but back then it was magic.

Moving all my dev tools to Linux after finally realising they all ran worse on windows, including .NET core

Endless fiddling with wine to get games to start, now completely solved but it was educational at the time.

Wacky shenanigans with wifi drivers and binary blobs back when wifi was still emerging.

I don’t know how you get the spark back once it’s lost though, I’d only suggest that the reward centre in your dome doesn’t fire properly unless you’ve been challenged and worked hard to solve whatever you’re faced with.

I think once they stopped being "Personal Computers", they stopped being fun. The most interesting era was from the 70s until the mid 90s, before MSFT completely grabbed the home computer market.

After that it is all servers and corporations. Although I have switched one of my laptops to Linux, I perhaps have never been a true Linux guy.

Computers are amazing because they are still open doors, to doing so much, to endless creativity.

As for me, really enjoying the wide diversity of bespoke well considered creature comforts people are building with Home Assistant. I love the various casting technologies & how it finally gave us a networked ubiquitous & pervasive cross device opening (very excited for Open Screen protocol).

My local area has a pretty active group of people doing LoRa and now wifi halow meshing, which is so cool to see: actual person to person connectivity.

I love seeing the huge variety of apps being built around atmospheric computing. Having one ur-connected Personal Data Server that we are sovereign over that atproto hosts (some technical quibles about use of "hosts" allows here) all kinds of different online apps is incredible, and it's wild what people are cooking up. The pace, the care, the community, now that we have a omni-purpose social networking software that respects the users is amazing, breathtaking. https://atstore.fyi

The whole agent era is amazing, with incredible agentic and/or vibe coding things on demand. We can learn and see so much more than before. People are going wild building systems they access remotely by phone, by ssh, by voice, that have so much on tap, that run such incredible and affordable models (deepseek flash rocking the house). Computing's form is in total review.

> I don't care for coding new stuff. Everything I may need either already exists or is too complex to do on my own (and no, I won't vibe-code it, what's the fun in that?)

Hahaha. Ok. You destroyed your spark a long time ago & are never ever ever getting it back with an attitude like that. You've grey bearded every drop of glamor out from the world if that's what you've let yourself think. That is the corporatized atittude you just decried! Dry and cut.

> Any suggestion on getting it back?

You have built all manners of walls and inhibitions that keep you from being involved, from considering possibility, from seeing progress. I have technical things I think are amazing that I've shared. But you need to work on tearing down the walls that you have walled yourself into, and finding a will within yourself that is able and interested in engaging the world.

> Basically, the spark I felt some 25 years ago seems to be completely gone.

You just need to find the right application for your skills to reignite it, e. g. a side project. There are also plenty of awesome books out there to dive into new topics (I like O'Reilly and No Starch Press books).

IMO it's still fun to hand-write C and Makefiles targeting an extremely resource-constrained device that's connected to an oscilloscope and a gunshot-wound worth of capacitance on your bench. YMMV

I've noticed the same thing. IMO, the heyday of computing coincided with the peak of WiReD Magazine. Around 1995 interconnected computers and the WWW bootstrapped a revolution in spreading+sharing information that seemed certain to reshape cultural norms, organically, bottom up, for the better. It seemed the world would never be the same. Heady times. That sense of optimism lasted until the computer unicorns morphed into monopolies. After that the roles reversed and all us net denizens became unicorn fodder. It's hard to stay upbeat after you realize you're no longer in charge and are constantly being manipulated wherever you go online.

Computer fun is inversely proportional to number of investors.

I remember the moment distinctly, it was the winter early in the year 2000. We had just survived the Y2K incident and I was in a VW camper van roving around, at the particular moment I was visiting a Twisted Python developer in the San Jose area.

I called it "losing my immortality"; I no longer felt like I had infinite time to just code for the fun of it. I just wanted to produce things. I wanted the result, not the journey.

I was just talking about it with my son yesterday, he's 17 and I'm 55. We were talking about the new Commodore 64 and how it was trying to bring the joy back to computing. He love programming and I'm trying to support that. But it looks very different for me than him.

He is loving th craft of programming, which is great! I remember that, and I think that will serve him well. I'm feeling the same joy in the results I get through using AI.

Solo and small-group computer projects used to be in a sweet spot of opportunity: feasible yet interesting to others. But opportunity-space is limited and fills.

To me a more important question is: where can people 10-30 years old bootstrap themselves on interesting and useful problems? They have intelligence and energy but not resources or connections (mostly), and all that potential human capital will all be wasted if they don't have any tractable and fruitful domains. (We don't have to worry about those with resources, connections, or luck, but they're a small minority already tethered to value flows, in little danger of being under-developed.)

My concern in particular is that tech companies spent big on building free languages and tools (yes, you used to have to pay for compilers, IDE's, databases...) in order to reduce input costs of them and their customers. If AI already minimizes labor costs (both the work and the discovery and training of residual human talent), there's no reason to subsidize that self-training, and likely fewer portable skills (across more isolated tech stacks), further locking employees in, reducing cross-pollination (formerly within the valley).

Individual opportunity is shrinking. Young people feel it. Old people feel it too, even if they have bagfuls of tech stocks.